re:verb

On June 19, Rutgers University's English Department announced a slew of actions it would be taking in solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, including incorporating critical grammar into its pedagogy. As department chair Rebecca L. Walkowitz explained, this new approach seeks to foster "a critical awareness of the variety of choices available to [students] w/ regard to micro-level [grammatical] issues." In response, the conservative Twittersphere swiftly attempted to CANCEL Rutgers English, with everyone from Andrew Sullivan to Thomas Chatterton Williams anointing themselves writing pedagogy experts and declaring Rutgers’ approach substandard. But what exactly *is* critical grammar, and why might writing teachers want to deploy it? Further, what specific aspects of these conservative arguments makes them so misinformed, out-of-touch, and morally indefensible?

To help answer these questions, Alex and Calvin are honored to be joined by Asao B. Inoue, professor and associate dean for Academic Affairs, Equity, and Inclusion in the College of Integrative Sciences and Arts at Arizona State University. Drawing heavily upon Professor Inoue’s knowledge of critical language instruction, we address two conservative media responses to Rutgers English's announcement. The first piece we discuss, from Jeff Jacoby at The Patriot Post (yes, this is a real website), argues that writing instruction should be less concerned with social justice and more like Winston Churchill’s grade school grammar classes. The second piece, from Fox News' The Ingraham Angle, directly samples an interview with Professor Inoue from last year, both fixating on his use of the term “languaging” and missing his point entirely, which he clarifies and contextualizes for us.

After closely reading these texts, we conclude by noting an irony that may be familiar to listeners of past re:joinder episodes: these arguments fail even on their own terms, lacking logical rigor, empirical evidence, and rhetorical elegance. By contrast, we attempt to back up our arguments with credible research, anti-racist principles, and lived experiences of teaching and studying writing more recently than the 1990s.

Relevant works by Asao B. Inoue:

Inoue, A. B., & Poe, M. (2012). Race and Writing Assessment. Studies in Composition and Rhetoric. Volume 7. Peter Lang.

Inoue, A. B. (2015). Antiracist writing assessment ecologies: Teaching and assessing writing for a socially just future. WAC Clearinghouse.

Inoue, A. B. (2019). Labor-based grading contracts: Building equity and inclusion in the compassionate writing classroom. WAC Clearinghouse.

Inoue, A. B. (2019). How do we language so people stop killing each other, or what do we do about white language supremacy? College Composition and Communication, 71(2), 352-369.

Works referenced in this episode:

CCCC Demands for Black Linguistic Justice

Pedagogue Podcast featuring Dr. Asao B. Inoue

Baker-Bell, A. (2020). Linguistic Justice: Black Language, Literacy, Identity, and Pedagogy. Routledge.Bowles, S., & Gintis, H. (1976). Schooling in capitalist America: Educational reform and the contradictions of economic life. Basic Books.

Faigley, L. (1979). The influence of generative rhetoric on the syntactic maturity and writing effectiveness of college freshmen. Research in the Teaching of English, 13(3), 197-206.

Jencks, C., & Phillips, M. (Eds.). (1998). The Black–White test score gap. Brookings Institution Press.

Smitherman, G., & Smitherman-Donaldson, G. (1986). Talkin and testifyin: The language of Black America. Wayne State University Press.

Sublette, J. R. (1973). The Dartmouth conference: Its reports and results. College English, 35(3), 348-357.

Zancanella, D., Franzak, J., & Sheahan, A. (2016). Dartmouth revisited: Three English educators from different generations reflect on the Dartmouth Conference. English Education, 49(1), 13-27.

The president and his administration use rhetoric every day in speeches, press conferences, and written texts like executive orders and proclamations, but the material effects of this discourse can sometimes be difficult to observe. Today, however, the United States is the epicenter both for the COVID-19 pandemic and an unprecedented wave of civil resistance against local police departments and federal enforcement actions authorized by the president. So, how is the current administration's rhetoric implicated in the pandemic, policing, and protest?

To help us navigate these questions, our guest today is Dr. Cameron Mozafari, who uses methods from corpus linguistics to analyze emotional appeals and other rhetorical patterns in presidential speeches. First, Cameron walks us through his recent Trump-COVID 19 Corpus project, in which he has collected and organized all of the Trump Administration's public statements about the Coronavirus crisis. Based on initial analyses of this data, we discuss Trump's treatment of the virus as a war (as opposed to more typical framings of pandemics as water or natural disasters); the differences in register and epistemic certainty between the language employed by Trump and that of Drs. Fauci and Birx; as well as how (in)frequently Trump and Pence use the words "mask" and "social distancing" vs. words related to war.

Next, we analyze a related instance of problematic presidential rhetoric: the recent “Executive Order on Protecting American Monuments, Memorials, and Statues and Combating Recent Criminal Violence." We talk through how the order constructs a dichotomy between US national identity & "property" vs. Marxism / Anarchism & "crime" / "violence." This dissociation, we argue, is an attempt to shore up the administration's and local police departments' legitimacy at a time of unpopularity and unrest. It also serves to mask the state violence that has incited recent popular unrest and been wielded in response to it. Finally, Cameron tells us about a violent incident earlier this summer at a protest in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and we consider how clashes like this one are revelatory of the material effects of presidential rhetoric.

Works referenced in this episode

Blaire, C. (1999). Contemporary U.S. memorial sites as exemplars of rhetoric's materiality. In J. Selzer & S. Crowley (Eds.), Rhetorical bodies (pp. 16-57). Madison, WI: U of Wisconsin P.

Fairclough, N. (2003). Intertextuality and assumptions. Analysing discourse:Textual analysis for social research (pp. 39-62). New York, NY: Routledge.

Fauconnier, G., & Turner, M. (2002). The way we think. New York: Perseus Book Group.

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: U of Chicago P.

Perelman, C., & Olbrechts-Tyteca, L. (1969). The new rhetoric: A treatise on argumentation. (J. Wilkinson & P. Weaver, Trans.). London, UK: U of Notre Dame P.

Roberts-Miller, P. (2019). Rhetoric and Demagoguery. SIU Press.

Skinnell, R. & Murphy, J. (2019). Rhetoric’s Demagogue | Demagoguery’s Rhetoric: An Introduction. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 49:3, 225-232.

Stefanowitsch, A. (2007). Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy. In A. Stefanowitsch & S. Th. Gries (Eds.), Corpus-based approaches to metaphor and metonymy (pp. 1-16). Boston, MA: de Gruyter.

Sweetser, E. (2006). Negative spaces: Levels of negation and kinds of spaces. In S. Bonnefille & S. Salbayre (Eds.), Proceedings of the conference "Negation: Form, figure of speech, conceptualization" (pp. 313-332). Tours, France: Publications universitaires François Rabelais.

Thibodeau, P., & Boroditsky, L. (2011, February). Metaphors we think with: The role of metaphor in reasoning. PLOS One, 6(2), 1-11.

Links & resources related to Albuquerque, NM protests

News coverage of the Albuquerque statue protest shooting perpetrated by Steven Baca

Donation page for Fight For Our Lives (FFOL), an Albuquerque-based Mutual Aid organization

National list of local bail funds and other related resources

Today marks the inauguration of a new style of episode we’re trying out called re:read, in which we bring you sonic re-imaginings of literary works, featuring dramatic vocal performances, sound effects, and music. Each of the works we re:read will include themes related to current political and cultural events, and will be bookended by brief reflections on its implications for contemporary audiences.

For our first re:read, we bring to life a timely tale from horror master Edgar Allan Poe: “The Masque of the Red Death.” This story narrates a gala-turned-nightmare in the abbey of Prince Prospero, a rich despot presiding over a nation ravaged by a horrific plague known as the Red Death. To spite the threat of contagion, Prospero throws a magnificent masquerade ball, inviting his courtiers and friends to gather in a gratuitous, hedonistic celebration of life. The convivial spirit of the party, however, soon unravels as the guests’ creeping sense of their own mortality grows stronger, until they realize -- far too late -- that an unwanted guest is in their midst.

We hope you enjoy this reading, and that you’ll remember its key lesson. No amount of hubris -- be it derived from health, wealth, or power -- can protect you from the inevitable. With that in mind, please stay safe and healthy!

Work read for this episode

Allan Poe, E. "The Masque of the Red Death."

Music sampled in this episode

Change Taq - “Double Summits”

Change Taq - “Adolescent Nitez (Sketch)”

How to Disappear Completely - “Void Vision”

Michael Ghelfi - “D&D Ambience | Baroque Noble Party | Baroque Music, People Speaking, Glasses Clinging”

Current protests fueled by the murder of George Floyd represent a reckoning with the US’s long history of racism, settler colonialism, and oppression as codified in institutions of policing and governance.

In today’s episode, Calvin and Ben explore this fraught history as a way of contextualizing recent protests against anti-Black police violence in the midst of the COVID-19 crisis. We begin by referencing academic conversations about the meaning of state power, as well as some useful genealogies of the US’s race-making institutions and their relation to systems of surveillance and visibility, before ultimately turning to present questions about police and prison abolition. In looking to the past, we discuss the connections between slavery, Jim and Jane Crow segregation, urban ghettoization of Black people through redlining and other public policies, and the current epoch of mass incarceration. Finally, we think through the work of scholars and organizers who have been reimagining systems of public safety, discuss the key differences between abolition and reform, and begin to consider how those of us in higher education are positioned to work toward actual, material change, rather than mere virtue-signaling.

Works referenced in this episode

Alexander, M. (2020). The new Jim Crow: Mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. The New Press.

Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life. Stanford University Press.

Agamben, G. (2008). State of exception. University of Chicago Press.

Browne, S. (2015). Dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. Duke University Press.

Clément, P. (2018). Prisons and class warfare: an interview with Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Verso blog.

Davis, A. Y. (2011). Abolition democracy: Beyond empire, prisons, and torture. Seven Stories Press.

England, J. & Purcell, R. (2020). Higher Ed’s toothless response to the killing of George Floyd. The Chronicle of Higher Education.

Fassin, D. (2019). The Police Are the Punishment. Public Culture, 31(3), 539–561.

Mbembé, J. A., & Meintjes, L. (2003). Necropolitics. Public Culture, 15(1), 11-40.

Lowe, L. (2015). The Intimacies of Four Continents. Duke University Press.

Schmitt, C. (2005). Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. University of Chicago Press.

Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: on blackness and being. Duke University Press.

Vitale, A. (2017). The end of policing. Verso.

Wacquant, L. (2002). From Slavery to Mass Incarceration. New Left Review, 13, 41–60.

Further resources and reading

Petition to sign: CMU, Confront Racist Policing in Our Community

Pittsburgh’s Bukit Bail Fund

Duke University Press:

Police Violence Syllabus

Prison and the Carceral State Syllabus

NYC DSA SFWG Prison Abolition Reading Group Syllabus

Resource Guide: Prisons, Policing, and Punishment by Micah Herskind

“Yes, We Literally Mean Abolish the Police” by Mariame Kaba

On today's show, Calvin and Ben speak to our friend, colleague, and former re:verb producer Dr. Ryan Mitchell. Recently, Ryan defended his dissertation, a rhetorical history of the early years of the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and he will join Lafayette College as an Assistant Professor in the fall. Ryan’s dissertation traces the rhetorical strategies employed by urban gay men in the early 1980s to push back against totalizing, dehumanizing discourses of HIV/AIDS prevention. According to Ryan's analysis of texts like Callen and Berkowitz’s 1983 manual How to Have Sex in an Epidemic: One Approach, the success of these texts’ rhetorical strategies depended heavily on their viscerality -- their illumination of subjects' lived, bodily experiences of porousness and permeability -- to both illustrate and justify various intersubjectively-oriented safe sex protocols. Ultimately, Ryan argues, texts like Callen and Berkowitz’s served to protect urban gay men from the worst ravages of the disease while also, crucially, affirming their communal identities and agency. 

After talking through the major rhetorical concepts Ryan employs in his work, we shift into a discussion of how this all might relate to current discourses surrounding the COVID-19 pandemic. As Ryan wisely reminds us, no two disease crises are identical, and there are many mismatches between the early years of HIV/AIDS and where we are currently. Even still, as we discuss, the rhetorics that Ryan has studied emphasize the visceral embodied experiences of those most victimized by public health crises while also promoting social practices, norms, and policies to foster intersubjective ethics of care -- all of which may be worthy of consideration as we navigate the social and political upheaval of our present moment.

Works Referenced in this Episode

Cazdyn, E. (2012). The already dead: the new time of politics, culture, and illness. Duke University Press.

Hauser, G. (2012). Prisoners of conscience : moral vernaculars of political agency. University of South Carolina Press.

Hawhee, D. (2011). Looking into Aristotle's eyes: Toward a theory of rhetorical vision. Advances in the History of Rhetoric, 14(2), 139-165.

Johnson, J. (2016). “A man’s mouth is his castle”: The midcentury fluoridation controversy and the visceral public. The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 102(1), 1–20.

Kennerly, M. (2010). Getting Carried Away: How Rhetorical Transport Gets Judgment Going. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 40(3), 269–291.

Larson, S. R. (2018). “Everything inside me was silenced”:(Re) defining rape through visceral counterpublicity. Quarterly Journal of Speech, 104(2), 123-144.

Mitchell, R. (2019). Decoupling sex and intimacy: the role of dissociation in early AIDS prevention campaigns. Argumentation and Advocacy, 55(3), 211-229.

Rice, J. (2017). The Rhetorical Aesthetics of More: On Archival Magnitude. Philosophy & Rhetoric, 50(1), 26-49.

Rowland, A. L. (2020). Zoetropes and the Politics of Humanhood. Ohio State University Press.

In this timely re:joinder episode, Sophie, Calvin, and Alex gather over Zoom to engage with some truly vile COVID-19 takes -- so you don't have to!

Calvin shares "The Media Are Embarrassing Themselves Over Trump's Use of 'Chinese Virus'", written by a guy named John at the conservative Federalist magazine, which apologizes for President Trump's strategic framing of the virus as inherently Chinese. In denying and obfuscating Trump's racist language, John makes some mind-bogglingly context-stripped and hypocritical claims, such as accusing "the media" (reminder: The Federalist is a media outlet) of doing performative outrage. Yet, as we point out, The Federalist is only able to publish many of these arguments because the corporate media has generally done a terrible job of frame-checking (Cloud, 2018) the administration and its rhetorical allies. Nevertheless, reporters are asking valid questions about Trump's language in this case, we argue.

Then, Alex brings in "Freedom Means Letting People Make Risk Calculations About Coronavirus" by Chuck Devore, a piece ALSO published in The Federalist, which makes a circuitous, scattershot argument for science denialism out of fealty to "the free market." Devore decries social distancing, emphasizes the effects of "the Wuhan flu" on the restaurant industry, and endorses some of Trump's favorite questionable treatment options (e.g. hydrochloroquine) and the far-right Internet's favorite anti-Chinese conspiracy theories. Concluding on a ceremonial note, he invokes the classic Patrick Henry quote "give me liberty or give me death!" as he predicts that our "competition"-oriented healthcare system will ultimately save us from this crisis, while simultaneously implying that re-opening Applebee’s should be our national priority.

Lastly, Sophie shares some awful tweets from Matthew John Dowd and Buck Sexton, both of whom argue that social distancing is doing more harm than the mass death which would surely follow abandoning social distancing. A few days later, Sexton tweets a friend's report of devastation in a New York hospital, demanding that his followers "pray" for the victims. Across all of these takes, we notice a consistent theme of moral vanity, nihilism, and sacrificial devotion to the capitalist economy. In response, we propose that after COVID-19, the economy might just need to change a little!

Texts Analyzed in this Episode

J. (Mar. 19, 2020). The Media Are Embarrassing Themselves Over Trump’s Use Of ‘Chinese Virus’. The Federalist.

Devore, C. (Apr 6, 2020). Freedom Means Letting People Make Risk Calculations About Coronavirus. The Federalist.

https://twitter.com/matthewjdowd/status/1242197861170847744

https://www.mediamatters.org/media/3861001

https://twitter.com/BuckSexton/status/1243656276997033985

With COVID-19 necessarily reducing our face-to-face interaction, we are increasingly reliant on digital tools -- from conferencing software like Zoom to social networks like Twitter -- to mediate our social, political, and cultural lives. Yet each digital tool brings along specific rhetorical affordances and constraints, a topic that few scholars have studied more closely in recent years than our guest this week, James J. Brown, Jr. (@jamesjbrownjr), Associate Professor of English and Director of the Digital Studies Center at Rutgers University.

In remote conversation, Calvin and James discuss the continuing relevance of notions of digital hospitality and ethos from James's 2015 book Ethical Programs: Hospitality and the Rhetorics of Software, as well as new research James is conducting on the problem of harassment on communication platforms -- from early-20th-century phone network subscribers to today's Twitter trolls. As part of this work, James's new piece in Amodern, "Epicrisis for an Epic Crisis", analyzes rhetorical strategies used by women and people of color to comment on and catalogue instances of bad communicative behavior on platforms and networks. Along the way, we touch upon the value of records, fantasy baseball, and videogames at times like these, as well as why Tressie McMillan Cottom (@tressiemcphd) is the undisputed master of the quote-tweet.

@tressiemcphd’s quote-tweet-thread in response to James’s article

References

Brock Jr, A. (2020). Distributed Blackness: African American Cybercultures (Vol. 9). NYU Press.

Brown, J. J. (2015). Ethical programs: Hospitality and the rhetorics of software. University of Michigan Press.

Brown, J. J. (2020). Epicrisis for an epic crisis. Amodern, 9.

Campbell, K. K. (2005). Agency: Promiscuous and protean. Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 2(1), 1-19.

Derrida, J., & Dufourmantelle, A. (2000). Of hospitality. Stanford University Press.

Hyde, M. J. (Ed.). (2004). The ethos of rhetoric. University of South Carolina Press.

Lanham, R. A. (1991). A handlist of rhetorical terms. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Rollins, B. (2005). The ethics of epideictic rhetoric: Addressing the problem of presence through Derrida's funeral orations. Rhetoric Society Quarterly, 35(1), 5-23.

Rosenfield, L. W. (1980). The practical celebration of epideictic. Rhetoric in transition: Studies in the nature and uses of rhetoric, 131-55.

Walker, J. (2000). Rhetoric and poetics in antiquity. Oxford University Press.

The spread of COVID-19 has changed the way we see our own relationship to space and mobility. Within this state of emergency, disparities in access are made more stark: as certain sectors of workers are able to continue their jobs under quarantine and observing social distancing guidelines while other sectors are forced into dangerous forms of mobility, borders old and new are being inscribed and reinscribed through austerity measures. The present crisis has exposed not only the existence but the extremity of this precarity, and has the paradoxical effect of making it seem like a shockwave momentarily fissuring our otherwise just system.

To explore some of these increasingly-relevant issues, we focus today’s episode around two discussions of the concept of “mobility” and how it functions in culture. The first is a free-roaming conversation between Alex and (newly-minted on the mic) co-producer Ben Williams about their shared experiences and reflections living in self-isolated “stasis,” as well as how the language of crisis in the era of COVID-19 belies structural inequalities already experienced by certain groups in our society. The second is an interview with Dr. Marian Aguiar, a professor of literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University. Dr. Aguiar has focused on issues in globalization, postcolonial studies, and feminism, and her recent work on refugee mobilities explores transnationalism through the ways we represent and imagine movement.

During this latter conversation with Dr. Aguiar, we examine what it means to be displaced, and how various accounts of migration stabilize and destabilize representations of refugeehood through narratives, visual documentation, and art installations. Finally, we focus on the systemic currents that subject those who’ve been displaced to drifts as they cross national borders and seek asylum, as well as the affective currents that both help and hinder advocacy struggles over immigration policy and expanding the freedom of movement.

Dr. Marian Aguiar’s work on space, place, and mobility

Aguiar, M. (2011). Tracking Modernity India’s Railway and the Culture of Mobility. University of Minnesota Press.

Aguiar, M. (2018). Arranging Marriage Conjugal Agency in the South Asian Diaspora. University of Minnesota Press.

Aguiar, M., Mathieson, C., & Pearce, L. (2019). Mobilities, literature, culture. Palgrave Macmillan.

Works and Concepts cited in this Episode

Berlant, L. (2011). Cruel optimism. Duke University Press.

Bissell, D. (2007). Animating suspension: waiting for mobilities. Mobilities, 2(2), 277-298.

Butler, J. (2015). Notes toward a performative theory of assembly. Harvard University Press.

Coetzee, J. M. (1980). Waiting for the barbarians. Penguin Books.

Cresswell, T. (2006). On the move: Mobility in the modern western world. Taylor & Francis.

Cresswell, T. (2014). Place: an introduction. John Wiley & Sons.

Debord, G. (2012). Theory of the derive [originally published 1958]. Situationist International Anthology, 50-54.

Lancione, M. & Simone, A. (2020). Bio-austerity and solidarity in the Covid-19 space of emergency - episode one. Society and Space. Retrieved from: https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/bio-austerity-and-solidarity-in-the-covid-19-space-of-emergency

Lautor, B. (2020). Is this a dress rehearsal? Critical Inquiry. Retrieved from:

https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/03/26/is-this-a-dress-rehearsal/

Malkki, L. (1996). Speechless Emissaries: Refugees, Humanitarianism, and Dehistoricization. Cultural Anthropology, 11(3), 377–404.

Nguyen, L., & McCallum, K. (2016). Drowning in our own home: a metaphor-led discourse analysis of Australian news media reporting on maritime asylum seekers. Communication Research and Practice, 2(2), 159-176.

Santa Ana, O. (2002). Brown tide rising: Metaphors of Latinos in contemporary American public discourse. University of Texas Press.

Steinberg, P., & Peters, K. (2015). Wet ontologies, fluid spaces: Giving depth to volume through oceanic thinking. Society and Space, 33(2), 247-264.

Sharpe, C. (2016). In the wake: on blackness and being. Duke University Press.

Cover image: Ai Weiwei’s art installation: covering the Berlin Konzerthaus with life jackets used by refugees crossing the Mediterranean.

For the inaugural episode in our new series on Space, Place, and Mobility, re:verb co-producer Sophie Wodzak sits down with Alisha B. Wormsley, a Pittsburgh-based interdisciplinary artist and cultural producer. Wormsley’s work bridges public art, social engagement, science fiction, and political activism to reveal forgotten histories and imagine alternative futures. Through innovative public works like the There Are Black People in the Future billboard (which we discussed back in Episode 6), The People are the Light, and her current project, the Sibyls Shrine Residency Program, Wormsley uses her art to engage a diverse array of audiences in exploring the beauty and rich history of black communities in Pittsburgh.

In this interview, Sophie talks with Alisha about her past and present work and the ways that it plays with concepts of space and place to help us critically interrogate our notions of belonging and community. They also discuss the self-transformative power of traditionally-marginalized knowledges such as black witchcraft, and how such practices are being revived in contemporary art and culture as modes of empowerment.

Links to Alisha Wormsley’s Work:

https://alishabwormsley.com/projects

https://alishabwormsley.com/public-works

https://alishabwormsley.com/film

https://alishabwormsley.com/exhibitions

https://alishabwormsley.com/buy-art

https://www.pghcitypaper.com/pittsburgh/alisha-b-wormsley-and-ricardo-iamuuri-robinson-take-multimedia-installation-streaming-space-to-market-square/Content?oid=14709509

https://www.wesa.fm/post/there-are-black-people-future-resident-artists-present-their-projects#stream/0

Recently, millions of potential US voters heard newly-unearthed comments made in 2015 by Michael Bloomberg -- the billionaire, former New York City Mayor, and current Democratic presidential primary candidate. In his remarks, Bloomberg vociferously defended stop-and-frisk, an NYPD policy directive that disproportionately targeted poor people and minorities for warrantless searches. The controversy over Bloomberg’s remarks raise questions about how the former Republican has risen to near the top of the polls despite having a policy record and political ideology largely out of step with the current Democratic Party.

On today’s episode, we speak to Benjamin Dixon, the independent journalist, commentator, and activist who publicized the 2015 Bloomberg stop-and-frisk comments via his Twitter and YouTube accounts on February 10. Since then, Dixon has continued to use his platform to publicize and problematize Bloomberg’s record and rhetoric. We ask Ben about Bloomberg’s history and governing philosophy, the corporate media’s coverage of the Democratic primary, and the overwhelming role of economic power in electoral politics. We conclude by discussing the best practices for political advocacy that Ben has developed based on this and his other work.

Reference Material:

Dixon’s un-earthed audio of Bloomberg’s comments on "Stop and Frisk"

Dixon’s unearthed audio of Bloomberg’s comments on “Black and Latino Males”

Dixon’s original tweet publicizing the Bloomberg audio

Dixon’s recent article on Bloomberg’s comments in The Guardian: “Bloomberg is avoiding all scrutiny. It’s time to take a long, hard look at his views”

Aspen Times: “Michael Bloomberg blocks footage of Aspen Institute appearance”

Bloomberg’s response to questions about his stop & frisk comments

Interview with Benjamin Dixon in Jacobin: “Michael Bloomberg’s Campaign Is an Insult to Democracy”